Things to do in London this weekend (September 19-20)

Once again, Regent’s Park will be taken over by sculptures this autumn to coincide with the Frieze art fair coming to London. While tickets to the fair can cost up to £250 and are usually reserved for the collectors, dealers and creators of the art world, Frieze Sculpture is totally free to visit and gives a chance to the proles to get a peak at some contemporary artworks in the open air. Fatoş Üstek will curate the exhibition for the fourth year in a row. This year, instead of viewing the sculptures in isolation, the display is curated as a web of interconnected objects, linked together with materials, stories and communities. Highlights will include Angel Otero’s threshold-like doorway descending beneath the grass, and Tarini Sethi’s intricate stainless-steel screens depicting utopian scenes. 

Charge the steins! You don’t have to travel all the way to Germany for a lederhosen-clad knees-up this Oktoberfest – and you don’t even have to wait until October. Munich’s world-famous beer festival is very much on in London and the celebrations begin in September with big steins of beer, platters of excessively long wurst and loud oompah bands blowing brass like they don’t give a schnitzel. Oktoberfest began over 200 years ago, as a mammoth wedding party for a Bavarian prince and princess. It turned out that beer, bratwurst and all-round silliness were a match made in heaven, so now it's an annual excuse for everyone to cut loose as autumn approaches. Whether you’re after a traditional take on the event or drag queen-led partying, authentic Bavarian beers or east London craft IPAs, you can find the perfect Oktoberfest for you right here in London. You're sure to get a warm willkommen at one of these London Oktoberfest events. 

As the creator of Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight knows a thing or two about bickering brothers. But even the veteran show runner must have felt he’d met his match in Liam and Noel Gallagher, the gobby Cane and Abel of ’90s lad rock, as he set about finding an emotional thread for this barnstorming concert film of Oasis’s 2025 reunion tour. With the help of directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, amps turned up to about 111 and the endlessly quotable siblings on top form, he brings an unexpectedly touching story of forgiveness to a wall-of-sound concert doc that fans will lap up and even Oasis agnostics (like me) will be swept up in. It’s The Last Waltz with parkas, an unashamedly nostalgic time capsule to simpler days that finds the swaggering guitar heroes kinder, gentler and sounding as tight as ever. 

Polish artist Monika Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites. Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms. The Weight of Matter is a reminder of the possibilities and joy that can come with a second life.

Ever wanted to have a nosy around some of London’s coolest private buildings? Open House London gives guests free access to architectural wonders that are not normally open to the public – from schools and offices to places of worship. It’s an often rare chance to explore iconic or just interesting buildings that make up the capital’s storied history, while the programme usually includes tons of workshops, exhibitions and more, as well as the usual tours. This year, the full programme will be announced on July 15, with bookings opening on August 19. Get practising your clicking now – these tickets go faster than Glastonbury.

Any musical that wins five Tony awards and tempts the legendary Maria Friedman out of unofficial retirement is probably going to be alright, isn’t it? Well yes. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation, Friedman stars as Kimberly LeVaco, a 15-year-old New Jersey schoolgirl who suffers from an unnamed condition which makes her age at four times the usual speed. This inverted suburban Benjamin Button allows itself the one wild metaphysical flourish and plays it with a beautifully straight bat. It’s a rare gift of a role to a sixtysomething actor and Friedman absolutely seizes it in Michael Longhurst’s UK premiere.

Styled as a ‘meyhane’ – the raki-soaked Turkish equivalent of a provincial British gastropub with good food, good drinks, and the strong likelihood of banter – Kismet is the latest in a long line of impressive residencies upstairs at Borough Market’s Globe pub. Deftly, it bridges the gap between London’s old school Turkish institutions and the chichi Euro small-plates scene. Which makes sense, as it’s run by Dom Hamdy of the Bistro Freddie and Crispin coterie of restaurants alongside former Bibi and Harwood Arms chef Keiran Mustafa. The menu leans more Cypriot than most mangals with fresh and herby, Levantine flavours and a little less bready stuff. The set menu (£48 a head) seems to be the best and easiest way to go. It does however come with constant warnings not to fill up too early, and to definitely not add anything extra. It’s the opposite of upselling and we’re here for it. 

The Bayeux Tapestry isn’t just a work of art: it is literal history, a near-1,000-year-old artefact that is also the primary source for our understanding of the most momentous year in the story of our own country. Woven in England, displayed in Bayeux, Normandy, the tapestry is now on display in the British Museum. Photos of a few key moments in your school textbooks may encompass its highlights, but they scarcely touch on it as art. Laid out flat in one continuous 70 metre strip, the Bayeux Tapestry is astonishing, a heady mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar that teeters somewhere between outsider art, medieval illumination, action cartoon, historical document and blithe propaganda. It’s extraordinary to see: sacred, profane, childish, profound, defining of our world but utterly unworldly.

Last year, after a nine-year-long hiatus, the magnificent Brick Lane Curry Festival made a welcome return. And, saving us from another near-decade of waiting, it’s back again for 2026. E1’s curry houses will come together for this free festival on Brick Lane and nearby streets this September. The main event is on Sunday 20 and will commence with a colourful procession from Buxton Street to the iconic Brick Lane Arch, with themed floats, dancers and community groups. Throughout the rest of the day, visitors can expect street food stalls, chef demonstrations and live bands and DJs alongside a host of family-friendly fun stilt walkers, magicians and live graffiti presentations, plus some opportunities to get stuck in at henna and bangla dancing workshops. If you register for the festival via Eventbrite you can get 20 percent off at all participating restaurants across the weekend. 

How many philosophy and music festivals do you know? Well, this is the world’s largest, and it’s serving up an all-you-can-eat buffet of debates, music and comedy. If you’re missing your uni years – not the clubbing, but the classes – then HowTheLightGetsIn is for you. Promising two days of debate and discussion, this Hampstead Heath festival is the thinking man’s Reading Fest. Hear from physicist Roger Penrose, astrophysicist Priya Natarajan, cosmologist Neil Turok, broadcaster Louis Theroux, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, and more at over 300 debates, screenings, musical performances and comedy sets. For when you've done enough pondering Plato, Foucault and Sartre, comedy will be provided by Harriet Kemsley (Last One Laughing) and Fathiya Saleh, while tunes will be supplied by Patrick Wolf, The Turbans and Prima Queen. As the world's largest philosophy and music festival, it's sure to keep your brain buzzing long after it ends.

This chi chi festival is a relatively new addition to London's cultural scene, but it's got an impressively high-profile line-up of names involved. After last year's inaugural edition, it's back with four days of events from the worlds of art, performance, music and literature. Things kick off with a conversation between Bella Freud and Susie Cave (Sep 16), talking about Nick Cave's new literary tribute to his wife. There's also an evening with Bernardine Evaristo and friends (Sep 17), a celebby reading of A Poem For Every Night of The Year with guests including Asa Butterfield, Tamsin Greig, Giles Terera MBE and Samantha Spiro (Sep 18), and an edition of Diaries of Note with Celia Imrie (Sep 19).

The latest in the recent movie canon of hitherto-unsung British war heroes suggests that our national obsession with the weather really paid off in the days leading up to Operation Overlord – the invasion of occupied France – in June 1944. In the stalwart figure of Andrew Scott’s meteorologist Capt. James Stagg, helped avert catastrophe in World War II. Expanded from David Haig’s 2018 stage play, Pressure asks you to ride shotgun with the weatherman as he enters the Allies’ country house HQ for what must surely be the most stressful 78 hours in any human’s working life. General Eisenhower (a burly Brendan Fraser) and his bigwigs have their eyes fixed on June 5 to send hundreds of thousands of men across the Channel. Stagg, however, is convinced that a pair of unseen storms is heading across the Atlantic and will wash them all away. Then again, postponing could mean fatally losing the element of surprise. Scott is magnetic, drawing icy charisma from an introvert who is as implacable as a weather front. This is less of a traditional war flick than a satisfying chamber piece about how people use and communicate information when the stakes are sky high and groupthink is kicking in.

Watch Clapham Common glow as hundreds of floating lanterns are launched onto the green’s Long Pond. Inspired by similar spectacles that take place across the world as a way to celebrate community and reflection, the Water Lantern Festival will let spectators make and light their own lanterns to add to the gleaming display with their own personal messages attached. There’ll also be live music, curated food options from local vendors, and activities. 

Director and adapter Darren Raymond has put a decent spin on the 1664 comedy about faith, following in the vein of his similar remixes of Shakespeare plays in order to open classics up to new audiences. Here, a priest pretending piety once again inveigles his way into a devout family whose young scions are about to marry — and fleeces them. But Raymond adds a thick extra layer which deals with the culture clash of a Jamaican and a Nigerian family coming together in marriage. Raymond has fun with the idea. Mark Rylance is the rooking priest Pastor Blake. His performance is false teeth forward, all salivary, with comically raised eyebrows directed at the audience. He pulls on all the tricks that made him great at the Globe. In Raymond’s take you can see Pastor Blake as a vestige of a parochial and rapacious white England which swindles and steals from black communities. You can also just enjoy the false teeth. 

As the world around us has burned or flooded this summer, the environmental themes of Lucy Kirkwood’s pointedly allegorical drama The Children have only grown more relevant in the decade since it debuted – as Lyric Hammersmith artistic director Rachel O’Riordan’s anniversary revival production makes clear. Ex-nuclear physicists and long-married couple Hazel (Meera Syal) and Robin (Declan Conlon) are living on a remote part of the British coast, trying to eke out a life in the radioactive aftermath of a disaster at a nuclear facility they originally helped set up. When ex-colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) suddenly reappears, the fallout from their past has ramifications for the future. The actors conjure an effectively brittle and on-edge atmosphere as the nuclear plant looms – literally and symbolically – over them in the form of the enormous reactor tunnel of Gary McCann’s set. It feels powerfully real and urgent.

TOWIE meets Blasted by way of the Iliad in this breezily provocative fourth play from rising star playwright Ava Pickett. Bloodsport is both fresh but also pleasingly of a piece with Pickett’s other work. Like her previous plays, it’s set in Essex and takes place in the aftermath of a Trojan War of sorts, although there’s no Greece or Troy but rather some kind of civil unrest that’s gripped the UK. Smartly, Pickett never defines precisely what this is or exactly what has happened. New-ish Stratford East boss Lisa Spirling has left it a while to helm a play on her own stage, but her pacey, emphatic direction is spot on. And there are some tremendous performances. 

At the start of The National Theatre’s most anticipated show of 2026 the two leads – Cate Blanchett and Nina Hoss – toss a coin at the start to see who plays which role. It’s an idea that has some resonance with the themes of duality and identity and shows how good Blanchett and Hoss are. And they’re really, really good: even if Benedict Andrews’ production doesn’t entirely ‘work’, the sense that it is just bloody amazing having two incredible actors doing an enormous amount of acting – and that we’re actually only seeing half of it – carries the night. Persona follows Elisabeth, a star of stage and screen who is sent to an isolated country retreat with her nurse Alma in the hope she’ll recover after being mysteriously struck dumb following her performance in a production of Sophocles’s Greek tragedy Electra. The two stars of the show are really bloody good, and watching them journey to the deepest recesses of the characters’ blurred souls is all you should want from the stage, really.

London is widely recognised as one of the design capitals of the world. Cementing this title is the annual Design Festival, a colourful and thought-provoking celebration of some of the world's best designers, who interrogate the boundaries of design through events, exhibitions and installations. The 2026 programme is packed full of surprising installations and intriguing collaborations. Wander down the Strand in Covent Garden and you'll spot The Pangolin Shield, a pavilion inspired by the endangered scaly beasts, situated opposite India's High Commission as a comment on the movement of people and species across borders, and the legacy of colonisation. Head to the Barbican and you'll have the opportunity to lounge on a comfy installation by MADE, as part of an interiors collection inspired by this architectural landscape. There are 11 distinct design districts, designed to highlight the places where creative Londoners cluster. 

The late Peter Jones’ labyrinth of polychromatic tunnels is returning for another UK tour, stopping in Clapham Common this September for a 36th year. Never been to Colourscape? Self-described as ‘Europe’s most unusual festival’, you wander around its big inflatable neon maze to see what musicians you can find inside. You might happen upon a flautist, a classical guitarist or, new this year, a Balinese gamelan accompanied by a troupe of Indonesean dancers. Who knows!? Those kaleidoscopic innards are designed to surprise. 

As You Like It is mostly a play about a large assortment of oddballs living in a forest for some reason. It definitely has a plot, but it also kind of plays out like an eccentric Tudor sketch show. While many productions get lost in the woods, dual directors Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine – plus their creative team headed by designer Paul Wills – are excellent guides through the trees. This is not a production that comes with a high concept, but by making every character as vivid as possible, visually and personality-wise, it’s just a great, boisterous production where you don’t find yourself questioning ‘and who is THAT guy?’ two hours in. From Lola Shalam’s highly strung romantic lead Rosalind and Grace Oddie-James as her amusingly laidback posh girl BFF Celia to co-director Josephine’s own turn as insecure wannabe geezer Orlando, all the way to Jonathan Broadbent’s scene-stealing Touchstone, it is simply very fun to spend some time in Wills’ whiteboard forest with these people. 

The V&A is staying open after hours again, for another of its brilliant lates. This time around, it’s being put on in conjunction with the London Design Festival, which has a hub at the museum, has the theme ‘Awakenings’, and will be ‘illuminating the unseen forces shaping our lives’. Head along after 6pm for a programme of free live music, performances, workshops, and talks all aiming to confront us with the forces shaping our futures. There’ll also be installations to explore showing how technology is reshaping our world and showcasing inspiring new thinking around identity, modern spiritualities, and the non-human world. Expect everything from embroidery workshops, interactive installations on soil, an eclectic DJ set from Holy Harm and conversations on ‘art labour’. 

Man to Man, the wholesale rival of the Tilda Swinton-starring 1987 version of German playwright Manfred Karge’s monologue, sees the curtain lift to reveal Swinton leering away at us in whiteface, housecoat, Y-fronts and a shock of punky blonde hair. This isn’t one of her arch performance projects; it’s a proper play, in which she loses herself in a proper character. It’s a show that predates her celebrity, the Stephen Unwin-directed project dusted off by a creative team who are considerably older but still very much with us. In impressionistic style we’re led through the life of Ella, a German woman who takes on the identity of her dead husband Max so that she might keep earning in the interwar era. Standing on Bunny Christie’s wonderfully evocative set, she takes us on her journey of feral, almost rat-like survival through the 20th century. Swinton has so much energy and presence. There is absolutely zero question: she’s still got it.

In playwright Simon Stephens’ four-hander (that for the most part is actually a two-hander), Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Ian Toner) have become unlikely bedfellows stuck in a bunker together while an apocalypse rages outside. Three years in, they know everything they could possibly know about each other, and maintain what little sense of hope they can by roleplaying key ‘moments’ from each other’s life – selecting treasured memories as you might a show on Netflix. The conversation teeters on the philosophical in places, but for the most part it’s a frank and relatable look at what really matters if you were to strip everything else away. For Ashton, it’s memories of a crush, a promotion, his mother; for Reece, it’s his son.

The Brit comedy superstar grapples with fame and fortune in his latest show, which kicks off in London in the autumn at the Apollo, heads across the country and throughout Europe, then call in at The O2 for a pre-Christmas victory lap.

Acclaimed Mexican-American stand-up Ricote settles in at the Park Theatre’s studio for a few weeks of shows. Inkling transfers straight down from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where the hard of hearing comic’s ‘stupidest and smartest show yet’ has received great reviews.

It hasn’t always been clear why Matthew Warchus decided to reconfigure the Old Vic to an in-the-round set-up. But it does all pay off with this fine revival of an early Alan Ayckbourn classic. 1969’s How the Other Half Loves is explicitly written to be performed in-the-round with a single central set standing in for the homes of couples Frank and Fiona Foster and also Teresa and Bob Phillips. Moreover, time is telescoped and chopped up, so that two very different dinner parties that happen on consecutive nights at the two different homes are spliced together into one amusingly unpredictable whole. It’s a funny, zingy, intricately wrought and strangely wholesome play and it’s the brilliant comic performances that make this thing tick. Roger Allam is superb as Frank, and Dorothy Atkinson plays an increasingly panicked Fiona. How the Other Half Loves still sings, a clever, strangely sweet infidelity farce that’s of the ‘60s, but remains timelessly funny.

Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying uses a blend of installation, video, photography, and sculpture to explore our complicated relationship with technology and how modern-day tech systems are reshaping the ways we live our lives – all with a humorous and surreal edge. See four of the artist’s imaginative, idiosyncratic and quietly provocative works at this free Haywood Gallery exhibition. A Life of Navigation includes Chihying’s early works commenting on our hectic urban lives, as well as two newly produced video installations commenting on artificial intelligence and gaming culture. 

If he hadn’t been France’s defining 20th-century statesman, Charles de Gaulle might have made a great comedy straight man. Played by a poker-faced Simon Abkarian in the first instalment of this two-part, bilingual French epic, he carries the air of a man who knows that, yes, that ladder is about to crash to the ground and someone is getting covered in paint. Adapted from Julian T Jackson’s 900-page 2018 biography ‘A Certain Idea of France’, De Gaulle: Résistance is about how the French President-to-be worked himself up through the cracks of history. He’s a captivating and paradoxical figure: a home-front soldier and an unelected democrat who conjures an unofficial mandate for himself through bulldozing force of will and an unwavering belief in himself and his country. HIn UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 28. 

The Royal Academy’s Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, is the first major exhibition devoted to the often overlooked Victorian artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing works like ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques and developed his lifelong fascination with fairies, creating magical, delicate, yet dark works crammed with naughty faces and gossamer dresses. Together, these works remind us that, although Dadd’s body was confined, his imagination never was.